‘The Devil All the Time': Pitch-Black Netflix Noir is A Sprawling and Ambitious Downer [Review]

Director Antonio Campos’ “The Devil All The Time”, a sprawling mosaic of religion, family, and DNA, is what one could describe as an “Appalachian noir.” It’s a tale filled with gougers, murderers, and losers — nobody wins in Campos’ weighty film and, set in an America on the brink of change, maybe that’s the point.

The film is an ambitious attempt by Campos to adapt Donald Ray Pollack’s 2011 novel of the same name. The setting is in a small town in post-War America and narrated by an unnamed narrator with a heavy southern drawl, who, at times, deviates from the storytelling by going into puzzling backwoods philosophical diatribes.

Filled with more than a dozen characters, and slipping easily into the Southern Gothic realm, this is the kind of story that the late-great Jim Thompson may have written a long time ago. The locale is southern Ohio, in the town of Knockemstiff. The story spans 20-years of genetic bloodshed as Tom Holland’s Arvin enters the frame, orphaned at an early age, and whose parents deaths lay the burden for the rest of the story. He quickly becomes disturbed by the town’s new local preacher (Robert Pattinson), who he notices is infatuated by young girls, specifically, taking a keen liking for his stepsister (Eliza Scanlen). Meanwhile, a serial-killing couple, played by Jason Clarke and Riley Keough, practice their sexual and murderous kinks on innocents during road trips. The Keough character’s brother (Sebastian Stan) is the politically ambitious Knockemstiff sheriff, filled up to his knee in debts with the local crime syndicate.

With a cast this large and this consistently good, Campos manages to corral each plot strand, and there are many, in just under 140 minutes of runtime. No small feat. A Southern Gothic soap opera, darkly shot by DP Lol Crawley, in 35mm no less, this isn’t one for the squeamish, the violence is unrelenting, the morals of the characters skewed, Pollack’s worldview pitch black to a tee. But Campos holds it all together, aided by fine performances from his cast, especially Holland who is far from the PG-rated world of the MCU here. Pattinson, as the predator preacher, gets your blood boiling in every scene, his character is written in ways that veer towards caricature but there’s never a moment where his acting feels stretched out or over-acted.

It’s not as if Campos’s first two films (“Simon Killer” and “Christine”) were cheery-uppers either. The 37-year-old filmmaker seems to revel in the morose, and “The Devil All the Time” lays it on a bit too thick in that regard. There are no subtleties here, just the message that religious hypocrisy lives on in America and that, no matter how hard you try, you can’t escape the DNA you are dealt with, the genetic coding that remains in your blood, from generation to generation. [B/B+]